When Pell became archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, Catholic Lite was the order of the day throughout the country, with the usual results: goofball liturgy (one bishop celebrated Mass made up as a clown); dumbed-down catechesis; a collapse in religious vocations and seminary applications; the Church bureaucracy joined at the hip to the hard left in Australian public life. Reversing this drift toward theological and moral incoherence and public irrelevance was going to be very hard work. Then Pell caught a break: when his seminary faculty threatened to resign en masse because he insisted that the seminarians attend daily Mass, Pell called their bluff, accepted their resignations, filled the seminary with new faculty — and never looked back.
Wow. A bishop with some serious chutzpah.
Cloning is against the Catholic faith, but I wonder if God could make an exception in this case.
I know it is naive to call for the election to the papacy of an Australian Cardinal who does not seem to have much to do with the Vatican machinery.
But stranger things have happened. The Catholic world needs some of his candour and no non-sense approach to the faith.
